


milk of human kindness

by mariusgaaazzh



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Character Study, Death, F/M, Grief, Memory, Poetry, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Substance Abuse, friendships, i miss my dead husband
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-17 03:42:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18957178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariusgaaazzh/pseuds/mariusgaaazzh
Summary: One woman's track through the Wasteland. Perhaps a softer take on the post-Apocalypse.





	1. Chapter 1

There was no way to fix this world.

The bombs fell. Her husband’s body was left to perish in the Vault 111.

And Nora sat alone, stabbing what Mama Murphy called vegetable soup with an aluminum spoon which was at least two hundred years old.

She herself was at least two hundred years old, even though it had been a week since that Saturday when she went to get the door for a scrawny-looking salesman, and had a perfectly bizarre conversation she was already imagining retelling to Nate. And then the sirens sounded, and the bombs fell.

The bombs fell.

And she didn’t get to die in a nuclear fallout just to see her life torn apart in other, more intimate ways.

Nora appreciated the irony, and the rage that rose within her from it. She was impressed with herself, above all things. She did not fall apart - though parts of her definitely did - but continued on, step after another small step.

She forced herself to eat the soup.

Behind the cloud of everything she was feeling, she could barely taste it. But there it was, serving some three frail nutrients to her overtaxed body.

Everything was a bloody mess. Skies rained radiation and acid, cows walked around with two heads, and she had to dispose of the skeletons of her neighbors.

The world was broken, but it still worked. Which meant that there was a future.

But now she had to eat the soup.

“Hey.”

Nora rose her head to the greeting, and saw the now familiar but no less ridiculous triangular hat, and a fairly handsome face with a broad smile attached to it.

“Hi there.” She offered Preston a small smile of her own, and gestured to another half-fallen-apart chair which was the craze of the catalogues only last week.

He did not like to leave her alone, since she had led them to Sanctuary. And Nora could not even take offense in the presumption of the gesture, because - truth be told - there was a point to that. She wouldn't quite want to be left alone with herself either.

And Preston was kind enough, and patient enough to show her the ropes, explain the ghouls, the Brahmin, and how to shoot something other than a handgun - things so natural to him and so alien to her.

“Enjoying your dinner?”

“No.” Nora shook her head. She wasn't sure if she didn't care about what she said to people anymore, or the part of her responsible for deadpan humor was coming back.

“That is perfectly fine.” Preston grinned. “We are going to send out a hunting party for radstag soon. Should get us some protein.”

‘Protein’ was a word he learned from her, just recently, and took good pleasure in using it. She smiled into her soup, warmed by his joy.

Because he also listened as she talked, in return. About what her home was. About the neighbors, and the messed up trash collection schedule, and how things would go in the firm, and the banks, and the mortgage, and how they finally decided to move to the suburbs for the kid.

And Preston listened. And not because he understood all that she had to say, she supposed, but because he handled enough survivors to know the importance of a story. And now Nora was a survivor of Vault 111, the only one.

She cried herself to sleep the first few nights, curled up on a damp mattress in the corner of what was the McBriars’ house, with weird mutated melons growing outside of her window.

She missed Nate, and so so much she missed her baby. More than anything, she wished for Nate to be here. She would give up a hand or a foot  so she would not have to be alone, so they could do this together.

On the fringes of stress and exhaustion, when she could no longer chase it away, a hope would come that it was all some sort of mistake, and that her husband would come for her. Aged a bit, a rifle thrown over his shoulder, the same kindness in his eyes. And together, they will find a way to move forward.

But Nate was dead, and she still had to move forward. Alone.

“Nora.” Came the voice, and she looked up, suddenly aware and embarrassed for getting lost in wherever it is people retreat to when it hurts too much.

Again, Preston was kind enough not to notice. “I have a favor to ask. Could you get into the power armor of yours after dinner, and help us move the rubble around?”

The rubble, Nora translated in her head, was the street on which she used to live. 

“Of course,” she nodded. “Glad to.”

Less that a few days out of cryo, and people took her as an expert pilot of one of the most perfect murder instruments invented by mankind. 

She did not remember what possessed her to crawl into the power armor on the top of the Concord Museum, or even more so - why she jumped straight down, to face the Deathclaw. 

Some of it was intuitive, some of it she picked up from Nate’s stories. In fact, it felt a lot like driving. As she was leading Preston’s people back to Sanctuary, she puzzled over why Nate hated getting behind the wheel, given how much he loved those damn T-45 things.

Nora was positive that he was sneaking in decommissioned parts to tinker with in their garage, against all possible federal regulations. But the federal regulations no longer existed, as well as the United States did not. There was no Army, which gave her husband a mild case of PTSD and a mildly livable pension. There was no justice system, which rewarded her with a severe caffeine addiction, a sizable paycheck, and a car which was now a pile of radiated metal.

She kicked it with her armored boot, and dragged it to the McBriars’ house, where Sturges would show her how to take it apart for salvage.

And then they would sit and talk, and pop some surviving  beers, and Nora would listen to the stories of others, those who ended up in Sanctuary under Preston’s watch. Those were harrowing, and yet passed around as easily as bottles of alcohol or pieces of roasted mole rat meat. 

The Longs lost their kid. And they knew that the loss was permanent, that he was snatched from them by the black maw of death. Jun could barely talk about it, while his wife sat there with tightly pursed lips and agitated impatience splashed across her face.

Looking at them, Nora felt both compassion and giddy relief. Because she knew that her child was still alive, he had to be. And she would save him. 

+

Preston called her a General. She wasn't sure if he was offering it to her as another gesture of comfort, or truly believed that they could build something together. In any case, she liked the name. It carried vastness, and power, and promised a degree of organization she wasn't sure this world was still capable of. 

Interesting, Nora thought, helping out with the tato plants in a newly established garden, how the words still carry such deep meanings, even as everything which backed them up is now gone. 

And so she was a General, and what she commanded was not nothing. Sanctuary was nearly a dozen working hands, a supply of clean water, and a couple of generators huffing behind a fence. A lone Brahmin wandered the main street, and they gave her a pen and what passed as dry grass, and Nora started to wake up to preoccupied mooing in the mornings. The limits of the settlement got their guards, and the fields were taken care of, and a first caravan arrived from a nearby farm. 

First caps eagerly clinged against the scorched plastic of the negotiations table, and Nora couldn’t help but to feel a ping of pride. She was good at extracting gain out of helping people. This was why she ended up as a lawyer on the first place.

Perhaps, some things still ran - in a broken world. 

+

But at the same time, Sanctuary did not quite sit easy with her - despite all the good work that had happened here, or maybe because of it. 

Nora knew that she had to go. And she could waste no more time, and idle no longer. 

Sanctuary was an illusion of safety on the edge of a vast and dangerous ocean. A corner of the world won from a greater, harrowing reality which still kept everything else within its hold. Behind it, was the past, death that breathed down her neck, and a faulty promise.

In front of her, was the future. It was an awkward one, put together out of scavenged shambles, mismatched gears, constant fear of radiation and poorly patched up walls. But there was also a kind of hope to it. Of finding her kid, clawing back a piece of herself that had disappeared into the deathless wasteland.  

Her power armor, now painted into the Minutemen colors, was tucked safely in what used to be the McBriars’ garage. And first time Nora ventured outside of Sanctuary’s walls on her own was without it, packing only a 10mm and stepping as softly as she could. 

She would never forget the dead, blank face of a feral who charged at her from the truck lockup ruins, and whom she shot straight between the eyes. The creature (no longer a person, no longer a person - she had to remind herself) continued twitching for a few moments after its death, bringing more dirt on what used to be a dress of a pleasant baby blue. Nora could have easily passed her in the supermarket only the last Tuesday, when it was nearly nine and they have ran out of Sugar Bombs, and Nate - 

She stopped herself, feeling for the metal of the pistol in her hand, for the dirty water she was ankle-deep in and which was slowly seeping into her high boots. This was now the world.  She leaned down to search the ghoul instead, trying not to focus too much on the slimy, irradiated skin, or the wet rags of the sundress coming apart as she searched the ghoul’s pockets. And was rewarded by a few candy wrappers. And that would have to do, for now. 

Since then, Nora made a point of not looking into the faces of those she killed.

She equally made a point of thinking of something else when she was searching the bodies - the Commonwealth of Massachusetts labor regulations worked just fine - all not to contemplate the thin line between the living and the dead. 

She shunned the ruins of her house as a memory of that death, picked up Preston’s little missions in an effort to see something in the world besides that, and started venturing further and further out of Sanctuary - until it was time to not look back. 


	2. Chapter 2

It was a wall of what used to be a diner that got her, in central Boston. Right next to the Old Corner Bookstore. 

Nora knew that wall, and that building, two hundred years ago. 

It was her second year in Harvard Law, and that guy, the one before Nate, would take her out for floats and coffee and they would sit and talk and go over the case briefs and do all the other things one does when one is twenty-four and is on the edge of being in love. 

And now it was death and rubble, and raiders’ corpses, and the sweet, decaying scent of blood, and the acidic smell of burning tires.

Nora hated how familiar she got with way the world was now, and how the way it was before felt like a dream, removed my circumstance, forever hidden behind the glass wall of _ no, you are not that person anymore. _ They are all dead. 

First, she could feel water on her cheeks. Mixing up the dust, seeping into the bandanna that covered the bottom of her face. It was salty, and bitter, and brought nothing but the terrible, pulling pain in the middle of her chest. She thought then that she was shot, that there was a sniper in one of the buildings they just cleared. She needed to find cover, to yell at Valentine to get cover, to jam a stimpack in.

To do that, she had to breathe. But instead of air, she felt a burning sob rolling through her body, shaking every tired bone and every aching muscle, making her incapable of movement, aware of nothing but the goddamn diner counter, the water on her face, and the paralyzing pain of it all. 

Nick’s hand was on her shoulder, which she recognized - because it wasn’t flesh. It was metal and bolts and gears, but it was as deeply human as the touch, and the intention, and the person behind it. She allowed the detective to hug her, and held him back, drenching the well-worn trench coat with snot and tears. 

She was weeping, Nora had realized. She hadn’t done so in weeks, not since those first few nights in Sanctuary, after which her jaw became set, and her eyes - following the horizon. 

Valentine did not say anything, but it wasn't a silence of confusion or detachment, but the one of deep compassion, and Nora clung to it as to the most precious thing. She felt less shattered this way, and less alone. 

“Sorry.” She said, finding enough air between the sobs, remembering how her lungs worked. 

“I... I just remembered a lot of things here.”

Nick looked at her in a way that instantly made her feel bad for apologizing.

“It's a good thing, to remember.” He tipped his hat, fixing its broken-in brims, as gallant and suave as the men she saw in crime novellas on TV, and - to a lesser degree - had a chance to work with in the precinct. “Can't say that I myself have been doing much of that.”

Nora snorted with laughter. 

She did not have to lie to Nick. Not when they fought through 114 in a storm of gunfire, not when he sat at his desk in the agency, and patiently listened to her spill her guts out - about dead husband, about her missing boy. 

Nick was comfortable. Nick was home. 

“You know, if you do.” She said, untying her bandanna to wipe the tears away. “I will be here for it, Nick. And we will see it through.”

Maybe it was a childish promise to make, amongst the scorched ruins of downtown Boston, to a man who was a bundle of borrowed memories in a synthetic shell, but it was the one she wanted to believe in. And maybe it was something that she wanted to see, but a small portion of sadness fell off Nick’s shoulders as well. 

The road was still ahead of them. 

+

The Commonwealth was not what Nora had remembered, but it was beautiful - in its own, ‘I wake up two hundred years later and everything is out to kill me’ way.

There was a kind of majesty in a radiation storm rolling in from the Glowing Sea. The sort that forces people inside, and everyone bars their doors and listens to the howling of the wind and the trickling of electric charges, as the very foundations of humanity’s last houses shake. 

Leaning back against the shack’s wall, Nora watched for the rare flashes of lightning.

She  wondered about the unseen, about the billions of dead, turned into atomic dust within a single flash of light and now travelling west in the enormous, violent clouds. She could nearly hear them. 

“Nice, isn't it?” MacCready asked, sitting with the rifle nested between his knees. “Don't see stuff like that if you stay in Diamond City.”

Nora didn’t respond. Knew that she didn’t have to.

The comfortable silences were common between them, trickling during the long hauls and short rests, forming curious crevices that lead towards even more interesting places. 

The man was a gun for hire - somewhat desperate, and somewhat cheap. Nora could barter the price down to a hundred caps. But he also pulled on that string inside of her, which was ready to follow every obscure radio signal and always wanted to know what was beyond the furthest hill. 

And didn’t mind getting her hands dirty.

And now they were stuck on a small farm to the side of a ruined overpass. The owners have kindly allowed them in, throwing a couple of sleeping mats into the corner and even sparing a few precious candles for the Minutemen. In exchange, they volunteered to run some repairs, and take care of the ghoul problem in the nearby plant in the morning. Or whenever there would be sun again. 

Nora blinked, feeling for a tiny coarseness in her left eye, bringing her hand to the closed eyelid. They shouldn’t be staying up that late.

“Something wrong?” MacCready turned his head, and the light fell on the long line of his neck, on the sharp collarbone half-hidden by a too-large sweater.

Nora shook her head.

“Something in my eye.”

“Lemme see.”

She rubbed it once more, “It really should be fine.”

“It could be a bloodbug larva for all I know.” He looked both ruffled up and uncertain, as he moved closer to her, as his hand hovered over the side of her face. And she found that endearing - like most things about him. And then it occurred to her, with the incline of his head, and the careful hold of his thin, yet strong fingers, that MacCready’s interest was not that much in her irritated eye, and dipped her head in herself.

Nora smiled at the small, surprised noise he made when their lips met, and thought, for a second, that he might pull away. And felt a light, electric thrill pass down her spine and coil with pleasant heaviness in her gut, when he did not.

She was mildly concerned about the lack of contraceptives, but then it wasn't the worst time of the month, and she would be surprised if radiation hadn't burned all ability to bear life within her. It was oddly pleasant, to once again think about her body in those terms, to once again be aware of the possibilities within it, to break the invisible seals of grief, isolation, and death she had placed upon herself.

She liked the stubble, and the sharp bones of his spine, and the way her breasts felt in his hands. He was considerate, and careful, and awkward just enough for Nora to understand that this was odd for both of them, and let him know she didn’t mind.

She didn't expect slow, thoughtful sex to be one of the qualities which transitioned well into the world after the apocalypse. But here it was, and it was good.

They did not quite talk about it the morning after, even as there was a morning after to speak of, when they woke up comfortably nested on the same dirty mattress.

Something was stirring between them, but it was something which neither of them were exactly in the right place to consider. 

So they just let it pass, as the homestead woke up. And Nora went to make a few turrets, and MacCready remained seating on the farmhouse porch, drinking carrot flower tea and watching the hilltops in the east.

+

“Why did you tell that kid that his parents were dead?” 

The moon was full. And it was only the sound of the splashing of the water, the soft hum of power armor’s servomotors, and the greenish light of the Pip-Boy that disturbed the ghostly luminosity of the night.

Nora didn't feel like talking about this. She didn't feel like talking at all. But Danse was a Paladin, and an exceptional squad leader for a reason. So even the silence that hung between them was dragging her out into the clear. 

“Because we found the kid, in a fridge.” She parsed the words carefully, looking into the bleak horizon of the marshes. “He had been there for two hundred years.” 

Danse listened. He always did, and that unsettled her. 

“That did not mean that his parents died.”

She would have been angry, at the cautious reproach in his voice, at how he couldn’t, wouldn’t see such things fully because he was of this time. Because what for her was an ugly, scarring wound, which occasionally still drew ichor, for him was a simple moral switch, between black and white. 

She would have been angry, but this would have been months back, but now she was just tired. Tired of feeling the same ache over and over at a very simple truth.

“Everyone died.”

Nora hoped that would be enough to leave Danse silent. And she would have to make it up to him, somehow, the next day. Now she just wanted to enjoy the pettiness of it in peace. 

But he spoke again, which nearly made her trip over a snag.

“Do you know what happened to your parents?” 

“Ma and Pa -” She took in a deep breath, navigating around the chunk of dead wood in the water, “.. were in Illinois. Most of my family, actually - except cousin Betsy, who made it to California. But later met a Russian and moved to Archangel with her.”

“Archangel?”

“It’s a huge port. There were so many ships there, more than you can see here now.” She nodded at the marooned husks of oil tankers in the distance. “It is so far north than the sun barely sets there during the summer. I haven’t been out of the country much, before we all flown over for the wedding… and honestly, I could not tell the days apart between that the vodka. But it was nice.” 

She smiled.

Danse held a pause, and she thought how alien the stories of the world before might be for him. Of the land with eternal sun, where people speak a language he does not understand. 

“Have you…?” 

“Tried looking? Yeah…” Nora nodded. “But it's so hard to learn, where the bombs fell, you know? It's all rumors upon stories upon fairy tales.”

It was a wild thing to believe: that somewhere, somehow there were people who would remember - not her, but the memory of her - and whom she can a family.  

The world was twisted and scarred. But it also carried wonders within it. 

There was a kid in the fridge. Who spent many decades in the darkness, and who had lead them to the light of his parents’ home. 

Wonders, but some of them were not for her. 

She only hoped for a single one: that her child was out there. Waiting for her. Safe. And she knew that she had what it takes, the vague thing called perseverance, and the ability to lie, and to tell the truth, in order to navigate the various factions which all claimed that they knew what was best for this land, what was justice for it. 

“The Brotherhood could-”

“No, Danse.” She couldn’t help but smile once again. Sometimes decent people end up in bad places. And this world was too short on decent people. ”Let’s keep the Brotherhood out of it.” 

The Paladin huffed.

It was somewhere there, in their tracks across the marshes, Nora started to notice that the painful what-ifs of the former life started to lift, like the morning fog which disappears from the wetlands with the first rays of genuine, afternoon sun.

Less and less, she was haunted by the inconsequential conversations with the milkman, with the associates in her office, by the commercial jingles she remembered from the time before.  There was something terrifying, yet also deeply beautiful - to see the world change before your eyes, to see all that you knew either turn to dust or rise from it in a new and wondrous shape. 

This world couldn't be fixed.

Maybe, she thought, hacking under the mirelurk shell with her machete, it didn't need to be.


	3. Chapter 3

“Yeah. A disco ball was a great idea.”

They lay right on the floor of what she did all the possible and the impossible to turn into a living room, watching the lights fall on walls in sparkling patterns, blissfully aware of the slow passage of time.

Hancock had talked her into investing. Something about the political capital, a safehouse in the Diamond City, and Nora ‘showing her face’, if she wanted ‘to get away with telling those people what to do’. Something about having an actual home to come to, rather than constantly moving between the settlements and sleeping on what other people had to give up.

So Nora greased the right palms in the mayor’s office, nudged the rusty steel door, and stood shaken by the emptiness and quiet of the place which was now hers. She threw her duffel bag and rifle into the corner, rolled up her sleeves, and went to get a broom.

Next, in came a rug, and a coffee table, and couches, and a chair. And a kitchen bar full of salvaged vodka and a book of carefully recorder recipes which would not give one radiation poisoning.

She just had to sort out the wiring, and all the lights would be on...

Hancock dipped in to wish a good morning, only to hear her cursing at the fuse box. Offered an awkward smile of a man who had no intention to help out, and then disappeared for a few hours, to came back with a glowing ball he hung above her kitchen, a couple of sandwiches, and enough jet to knock out a platoon of Gunners. She appreciated that.

And this was how the Home Plate became a home.

Nora had not been that high since the picnic Nate took her out for to celebrate her graduation. They just lay on the grass, and ate an abhorring amount of Lady Fingers, and laughed, and heard colors.

It seemed fantastic how memories, which previously composed the core of who she was, now seemed so foreign and strange, but still survived in her head.

Worst of all, she could not keep them apart. Everything was happening at the same moment. The ‘now’ and ‘before the bombs’ were both alive within her.

She kept stabbing the synth that jumped at her from the back around University Point until it stopped - finally - moving. But she also walked the same exact hallways when running late for the Torts class. She also took the Commonwealth of Massachusetts bar exam.

All of that was still her. And she was still the same person. Her cells were frozen for over two centuries, but her body remembered. The chemicals have blurred the difference between then and now. Of who she was. Or who was the man next to her. But, somehow, it was important to remember the line between today and when the bombs fell.

“John.” She made an effort to turn her head, easing herself back into _now,_ and met the relaxed, smiling face of the ghoul. “I don't think that having sex would be beneficial to our friendship.”

Hancock snorted, but there was no acerbity in that.

“I am glad we are upfront about that.”

There was a quaint curve to his smile, and Nora wanted to touch it - so she ran a hand down the side of his face. It was interesting - the texture, the scar tissue of chemical burns that still folded into expressions living and vivid.

John permitted her curiosity.

“Most of my nerve endings are still there. Some are mutated way out though..I’m actually not sure if it is from the radiation or from the other stuff I’ve taken.”

“Feels much different?”

“Aaah… I don’t know. I don’t think I care enough.”

“I was trying to piece things together, after the defreeze. That I feel different. But when I try to speak of it I can’t say in which way.”

“You can’t remember?”

“I can’t say if I remember correctly anymore.”

She tried to think of Nate, of the first time the nurse handed her baby Shawn, who was a beautiful boy, and not an old man commanding an underground city of morally bankrupt scientists.

But the memories were too sharp and too heavy.

“Sometimes you just start. And you don’t know how to finish. And you just go, and go, and go.” Her own voice felt almost material.

“Knowing when to stop is a useful thing, dear Nora.” John threw his hands behind his head. “But can’t say I ever bothered to learn that. You don’t have to be right about everything all the time. You just need to act like you are.”

Maybe it was better that way.

+

Nora kept hoarding civilian clothes. She knew it wasn't exactly healthy, but what out here was anymore. They were jewels of normality, treasures she folded neatly and tucked away in bottom of every chest and in the back of every drawer.

She would rip them off skeletons, dig then out of abandoned suitcases and looted department stores. And she would sob into the soft fabrics, when she would allow herself to. Or simply smell them, imagining how it would be to wake up in a full bed made up with cotton, and dress herself into something else than military fatigues.

“Ha…” Cait scratched the back of her head at the confession which poured out of Nora amidst self-dismissing jibes and too-careless laughter. “It’s not the worst thing you can care about. If you like them.”

The fighter was crashing for the night. And they were camping at the ground level of the Home Plate, passing around a bottle of whisky, lazy stories and bad jokes.

She came and went, like others did. Picking up a few bounty calls, running a few distress signals, looting a cigarette factory. Taking a few days for themselves to R&R.

“I know right.” Nora took a swing from the bottle. “Thought it was peak self-care to pick one from Bloomingdale’s”. - Just not to explain what’s a Bloomingdale’s. Would you like to try one on?”

Cait looked at her as if she had grown a second head. “No.”

“Oi, come on.” Nora interjected, mirroring her extremely fake Irish accent. “You’ll look lovely.”

Cait narrowed her eyes. “Only if you’ll tell me that multiple times.

Nora laughed, moving to the dresser with an unsteady step. “We’ll see how it fits.”

And Cait did change, back turned to her, and Nora silently contemplated the lines of scars and muscle.

They weren’t quite the same size. Nora was taller, but Cait - larger in the shoulders and the waist. The dress didn’t quite sit on her, but there she was: standing in front of Nora wrapped in the color of sunshine, as it shone before the bombs fell, among a house built from salvage and outfitted with scrapes. And both of them started laughing, because there wasn't a mirror.

“So do I look lovely?” Cait asked, skeptical, and yet hopeful for something.

“Yes.” Nora smiled, wide and happy, but then caught on something in her friend’s expression, handing the bottle to her. “But how do you feel?”

“Eh.” Cait took a swing.

She stood barefoot.  Not knowing how to angle her body to accommodate the unfamiliar cut of the fabric, how to look like she belonged into a century she didn’t know and didn’t remember

And maybe she didn’t have to.

A pang of guilt tore through Nora’s chest.

“You know what. Never mind.”

“I’m keeping it for the night thought.” Cait offered, almost as a comfort. And twirled around.

Nora laughed. “Of course you are.”

And when Cait was asleep on the mattress on the other side of the room, she sat clutching the yellow dress in her hands, thumbs carefully running down the seams, and cried her last, drunk tears over all the things she is never, ever getting back.

The polka-dotted dresses. Shopping sprees. The smell of old evidence lifted from the archive. Rumbling of the interstate in the rush hour. Five o’clock cocktails. Mac’n’cheese. Easter. Nate’s wedding ring in the far back of the nightstand drawer.

She had gained, despite herself, so much in this rusty, radiated world. But there were also things she loved, and wanted to remember, but also had to let go - one, by one, by one.

+

“That was whack,” said Nick.

Nora nodded, finally taking off her power armor’s helmet, and breathing in the unfiltered, seaside air.

Nate would be really proud of her, she thought.  She was really getting into the hang of piloting this thing. He wasn’t sure how Nate would feel about all the murder. But he definitely wouldn’t hold it against her.

They stumbled upon a lighthouse. Only to be shot at without a warning. And only to start shooting back at a dozen people with the Children of the Atom insignia on their jumpsuits. Mines exploded. Limbs were torn off. Heads popped like cherries. It was a fine day in the Commonwealth.

Upon a quick inspection, the place was spacious, with excellent visibility, room for a water purification system and a garden. They decided on setting up a transmitter and calling in the Minutemen. Nick hunched over the cultists’ leader, inspecting the funky gun, which fired radiation and looked like a bloated pufferfish, while Nora was moving the rubble and the bodies into a pile in the front yard. Other people can take care of the blood tracks.

“What is this, about the great division thing.” She grumbled, finally done and climbing out the armor suit  “And what about it becoming the need to shoot at people.”

“Folks out here really hold onto whatever keeps them ticking.” Nick echoed back, whipping his hands. “Can't really blame them for it.”

“Clinging to the heavens by the hems, huh?” She rubbed her sore neck.

Nick gave her a curious look. “Is that from something?”

Nora gave it a thought. It was a poem, a part of a poem she saw somewhere on the margins, and it rolled around her head like a ball, a lone an echo of her high school library.

“I don't remember the whole thing.” Nora responded. “And if I don't, I guess no one does.”

“How cursed we are by your poor memory.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Better help me out with getting those doors removed, Valentine.”

“Ah..” Nick winced. “In fifteen. I think I have a graze here.”

Nora just noticed a neat hole in the duster. And a slight hunch to one side. And coped by throwing a stimpack at her partner.

“Need a hand?”

“Nah.” Valentine jammed the needle under his shit, and breathed out the pain of it. “Got it. A smoke?”

Nora grinned.

Nick’s shattered, mechanical body was so different from hers, and yet he was the only person who could remember the world in the same way she did. They sat side by side, him - blissfully inhaling the smoke which did nothing to synthetic lungs, her - watching the glistening, golden sea Nora thought of every creature under its surface, its fangs and translucent, irradiated skin.

“Hey Nick,” She spoke, unexpectedly to herself. “Remember my cousin Betsy?”

“The Russian one?”

“Yeah, the Russian one.”

“What about her?”

“She ended up working as a translator. Children’s books. And poems.I remember some of them”

“Yeah?” Nick dragged his cigarette, his profile clear and sharp.

“What…” Nora cleared her throat and started, from what she thought was her memory.

 _“What would an ancient Roman recognize, if he were to wake up now? Firewood,_  
_Τhe shape of a cloud, a pigeon in the high up, the flatness of the water, something in architecture,_  
_Βut - no one’s face”_

“Ha.” Nick paused in thought. “How interesting. You know, I remember feeding pigeons, even though I never technically saw an actual one.”

“You’re like the ship of Theseus.”

“Of course I am, Harvard.” Nick waved her off. “So what does it do?”

“It is the same ship, even though it isn't. They had it up for display, in Athens, and when the old boards would rot they were replaced with new ones.”

“So I am the Nick Valentine. Even though I am not.”

“Exactly.” They bumped knees. “Does that bother you?”

“Not really.”

“Hm.” She sighed. “I’m the same way. Nothing about me ended up the way I had intended. But I guess I’m fine with that too.”

“Yeah.”

Nick blew out his last cloud of smoke, allowing the bud to simmer into ash between his metallic fingers. Nora smiled. It was a good day.

Two hundred years ago, the bombs fell.

And they lived. In odd transmutations of their former selves, but they lived.  Enacted their vengeance, fought for their justice. And maybe even did right by some folks along the way.

And the world lived on with them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nora's poems are: ["The Kingdom of God"](https://www.bartleby.com/236/245.html) by Francis Thompson, and [this](http://www.world-art.ru/lyric/lyric.php?id=7779) Brodsky piece.


End file.
